Pick a daylight minus tide first, then build the day around its arrive-by time. In 2026, the eleven West Coast stations Tidewindow tracks get 940 minus tides, but only 535 of them — 57 percent — fall in daylight, and the deepest cluster lands July 13–16. Newport, Oregon (NOAA station 9435380) bottoms out at −2.52 ft at 7:50 AM on July 15; be on the sand by 6:50 AM. Everything else in this guide is detail on that one move.
Tidepooling is the rare trip where the schedule is genuinely not up to you. The moon picks the day, the sun picks the hour, and your job is reading the intersection. The good news: NOAA publishes harmonic tide predictions years ahead, so the intersection is computable for 2026, for every station, right now. Here's how to use it.
What is a minus tide, and why plan around one?
US tide heights are measured against MLLW — Mean Lower Low Water, the long-run average of each day's lowest tide. A minus tide is any low predicted below 0.0 ft on that scale: lower than a typical day's lowest water, exposing rock and reef that stay submerged the rest of the month. The full definition, and why minus tides cluster around new and full moons, is in What Is a Minus Tide?
The catch is daylight. Minus tides are indifferent to your headlamp situation: of the 940 minus tides predicted at our West Coast stations in 2026, only 535 overlap daylight. Our lone East Coast station so far, Bar Harbor, Maine, gets 90 minus tides and 52 daylight ones, a similar 58 percent. The whole business of this site, tallied station by station in the Daylight Minus-Tide Index, is finding the lows you can actually see.
So the planning question is never "when is low tide?" It's "when is a low enough tide during daylight, near me, on a day I can go?" That last clause turns out to be the painful one, as the weekend math below shows.
How low does the tide need to be?
Remember that 0.0 ft is an average lowest tide, not an unusual one. A +1.0 ft low still uncovers sand and the top of the barnacle zone; the interesting terrain starts at the zero line and improves fast below it.
Two working rules, both tested against a year of NOAA predictions in the −0.5 ft rule article:
- Pacific coast: −0.5 ft or lower for a trip worth planning around.
- East Coast: about −1.0 ft, because the tide range and the datum sit differently there; the full reasoning is in Why East Coast Tide Pooling Is Different.
Thresholds matter because they decide which days qualify. Newport logs 24 lows below +1.0 ft in July 2026, nearly one per day, which sounds abundant. But only 19 of those produce a usable daylight window, and only 17 are daylight minus tides. Tighten the filter to the truly deep stuff and you get four mornings: July 13–16, all below −2.2 ft. Scarcity is the normal condition. (Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA station 9435380 predictions.)
How do you read a tide window?
A window is the stretch when the water is below the walkable threshold and the sun is up. Every window on Tidewindow carries the same five numbers. Here is the best one at Newport this month, straight from the tide window finder:
| Field | Wednesday, July 15, 2026 — Newport (NOAA 9435380) |
|---|---|
| Window | 5:25 AM – 10:30 AM |
| Predicted low | −2.52 ft at 7:50 AM |
| Arrive by | 6:50 AM |
| Daylight in window | 285 of 305 minutes |
| Score | 90 — Exceptional |
Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA station 9435380 predictions.
Reading it, top to bottom:
The window edges are when the tide crosses the threshold going out and coming back. The full span is 305 minutes, but the sun isn't up for the first 20 of them, hence the 285.
Arrive by is one hour before the predicted low. This is the core habit of the whole hobby: you walk out with the ebb, reach the deepest exposed zone right at slack low, and let the flood push you back toward the trailhead. Arrive at the predicted low instead and you get half the trip; arrive after it and the ocean is already reclaiming the good stuff. (The National Park Service's floor is "at least 30 minutes before the lowest tide," quoted in full in the safety section. We build in sixty.)
The score (0–100) blends depth below threshold, daylight overlap, and a weekend bonus, banded from Skip to Exceptional. The formulas are public on the methodology page. If you're still translating raw tide tables by hand, How to Read a Tide Table covers what the charts don't say out loud.
When is minus-tide season where you live?
The 2026 season is really three different seasons depending on your latitude. One table makes the point: daylight minus tides per month at four representative stations.
| Month (2026) | Seattle | Newport | Pillar Point | La Jolla |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| July | 18 | 17 | 14 | 10 |
| August | 13 | 13 | 4 | 2 |
| September | 6 | 6 | 3 | 0 |
| October | 0 | 4 | 9 | 6 |
| November | 0 | 5 | 12 | 12 |
| December | 0 | 5 | 14 | 16 |
Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA predictions for stations 9447130, 9435380, 9414131, and 9410230.
Read the columns and you can see the season migrating: the Northwest gets a summer feast and a winter famine, while Southern California's calendar flips upside down in the fall.
Puget Sound: big numbers, civilized hours
The Salish Sea has the friendliest tidepooling schedule in the country. Lows are deep and they arrive mid-to-late morning, no headlamp required: Seattle (NOAA 9447130) bottoms at −3.80 ft at 11:20 AM on July 14, with the entire 8:50 AM–1:55 PM window in daylight. Port Townsend (NOAA 9444900) does even better on duration: its July 11 window runs 347 daylight minutes around a −2.36 ft low.
July gives the two stations 37 daylight minus tides between them; August brings a genuine weekend gift, with Sunday, August 9 scoring 98 at Seattle (−1.91 ft at 8:29 AM) and 100 at Port Townsend (−2.05 ft at 7:38 AM). Then the door closes hard: Seattle records zero daylight minus tides in October, November, and December. If Puget Sound is your water, the 2026 Puget Sound low tide calendar ranks the whole summer, and the August calendar for Seattle has every window that month. We also track La Push on Washington's outer coast. (Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA stations 9447130 and 9444900 predictions.)
Oregon: dawn in July, dusk in December
Outer-coast Oregon lows land around sunrise in summer. The marquee run is July 13–16, when all four stations we track (Garibaldi, Newport, Charleston, and Port Orford) post their deepest daylight tide of the year, each one an Exceptional-band weekday morning. Newport strings together four consecutive dawns below −2.2 ft. The full-year Oregon minus tide calendar lists them month by month, and the Newport July calendar has this month's windows; reef-specific dates for Cannon Beach are in the Haystack Rock windows guide.
The season sags in fall (the four Oregon stations combined drop from 66 daylight minus tides in July to 18 in September), then does something useful: it comes back in the late afternoon. Port Orford alone gets 9 daylight minus tides in December, the best a −2.07 ft low at 5:26 PM on December 23. Those pre-sunset winter lows are prime agate-hunting conditions, and post-storm lows are their own discipline; see storm beachcombing. (Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA stations 9437540, 9435380, 9432780, and 9431647 predictions.)
California: the calendar flips in November
July in California is a pre-dawn problem. The deep lows come very early: Pillar Point (NOAA 9414131) gets a −1.79 ft low on July 14 at 5:33 AM, with just 165 daylight minutes around it; La Jolla (NOAA 9410230) hits −1.51 ft on July 15 at 4:54 AM, leaving only 113 minutes of usable light. By August 13 the La Jolla low arrives at 4:25 AM with 39 daylight minutes, a window in name only. September is the true floor: Monterey, La Jolla, and San Diego record zero daylight minus tides that month.
Then the flip. From November, the deep lows migrate to mid-afternoon, and Southern California becomes the best tidepooling in the country while the Northwest goes dark. La Jolla gets 12 daylight minus tides in November and 16 in December, capped by a −1.72 ft low at 4:33 PM on Christmas Day — an Exceptional 90, on a holiday, in shirtsleeve light. San Diego (NOAA 9410170) matches it nearly wave for wave. Station-level date lists live in the La Jolla guide, the Cabrillo National Monument guide, the Pillar Point guide, and, for the reserve up the coast from Monterey waters, the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve guide. (Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA stations 9414131, 9413450, 9410230, and 9410170 predictions.)
The East Coast: fewer, and by different rules
Bar Harbor's 90 minus tides (52 in daylight) obey a different geometry than the Pacific's, and the walkable threshold sits lower. Start with Why East Coast Tide Pooling Is Different, then the Acadia National Park windows guide for Bar Island and Ship Harbor timing.
Why do the deepest tides dodge the weekend?
Because orbital mechanics doesn't take meetings. Summer's deepest Pacific lows land near dawn on whatever weekday the moon dictates (the mechanism is in Why Summer's Lowest Tides Happen at Dawn on the Pacific Coast), and in 2026 the dice came up cruel. Take the four deepest daylight windows at each of the ten regional stations above (every tracked West Coast station except La Push): 40 windows. Only 5 fall on a weekend or holiday, and three of those are Christmas Day.
| Date (2026) | Station | Low | Time | Arrive by | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun, Jul 12 | Port Townsend (9444900) | −3.10 ft | 8:47 AM | 7:47 AM | 100 |
| Sun, Jul 12 | Seattle (9447130) | −3.16 ft | 9:40 AM | 8:40 AM | 100 |
| Fri, Dec 25 | La Jolla (9410230) | −1.72 ft | 4:33 PM | 3:33 PM | 90 |
| Fri, Dec 25 | San Diego (9410170) | −1.71 ft | 4:36 PM | 3:36 PM | 89 |
| Fri, Dec 25 | Monterey (9413450) | −1.71 ft | 5:53 PM | 4:53 PM | 79 |
The only weekend-or-holiday entries among the 40 deepest daylight windows of 2026; computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA predictions for stations 9447130, 9444900, 9437540, 9435380, 9432780, 9431647, 9414131, 9413450, 9410230, and 9410170.
Oregon's count in that table is zero: all sixteen of its deepest windows land Monday through Thursday. This is why our score carries a weekend bonus: for most households, a −2.29 ft Saturday beats a −3.80 ft Tuesday, which is exactly how Saturday, July 11 (8:49 AM low) outscores July 14 at Seattle, 100 to 90. If your crew is school-aged, the weekend-only windows worth a tank of gas are collected in Tidepooling With Kids.
The hour-of-day pattern is just as lopsided as the day-of-week pattern. Across all 535 daylight minus tides on the 2026 West Coast, the most common hour for the low is 6 AM (56 of them), and 312 of the 535 (58 percent) hit before 1 PM. The afternoon consolation peak, 51 lows in the 5 PM hour, belongs to fall and winter. Set the alarm; that's the price of admission. (Computed 2026-07-03 from NOAA predictions across the eleven West Coast stations.) And when the November–January perigean cycle produces the extreme highs and the rare daylight extreme lows, the dates are on the king tides 2026–27 page.
Which tool does what?
All four tools run on the same NOAA predictions and the same scoring:
- Tide Window Finder — the daily driver. Pick a station, get the next 30 days of daylight windows, ranked, each with the arrive-by time. If you use one thing on this site, use this.
- Trip Picker — for fixed dates. Give it your vacation week and a beach; it returns the single best hour in that range, even when the honest answer is "Thursday, 6:12 AM, and it's only a Fair."
- Year Heatmap — for choosing the dates in the first place. All 365 days at a station, colored by window quality. The July 13–16 band glows at every Northwest station; at La Jolla the glow sits in December. Book travel from this view, then confirm with the Finder.
- Golden Hour — for photographers. It finds lows that overlap golden-hour light, with the sun's bearing at the moment of the low. Winter afternoon lows like La Jolla's 4:33 PM on December 25 are exactly the overlap it hunts; the year's 20 best are written up in Golden Hour at Low Tide.
Beachcombers get their own timing logic (minus tides plus winter swell) in Best Time for Sea Glass Hunting.
What do the rangers want you to know?
Tidewindow computes predictions; it doesn't stand on the beach with you. For safety, we defer entirely to the people who do. The following is quoted from National Park Service pages, linked in the sources:
- Timing: "Plan to arrive at the beach trailhead at least 30 minutes before the lowest tide." — NPS, Tidepooling on the Olympic Coast
- The returning water: "Watch closely for the returning tide and 'sneaker waves.'" — NPS, Olympic Coast. Redwood's Enderts Beach page puts the standing rule in six words: even at low tide, "never turn your back on the ocean."
- Footing: "Algae and seaweed make the surface rocks extremely slippery. Use caution and test rocks before committing to stepping on new surfaces." — NPS, Olympic Coast
- Preparation: "Always carry a tide table, topographic map, and keep track of the time whenever hiking along Olympic's coast." And note that predictions are not guarantees: "Strong winds or storms can significantly elevate tides and create hazardous conditions, particularly in the fall, winter, and spring." — NPS, Tides and Your Safety
- The animals: "Rough or excessive handling hurts animals. Never force an animal off its spot, you may tear off its feet, or squeeze its organs." — NPS, Olympic Coast
Check the managing park's own page before you go; access, closures, and local rules vary, and they change.
The whole plan, in five steps
- Pick the season for your coast. Northwest: July–August mornings. Southern California: November–January afternoons. Use the Year Heatmap to see it at a glance.
- Pick the day. Tide Window Finder for the next 30 days, or Trip Picker if your dates are fixed. Expect the deepest tides on weekdays; only 5 of 2026's 40 deepest West Coast daylight windows are weekend-or-holiday days.
- Anchor on the arrive-by time. One hour before the predicted low. For Newport's July 15 window that's 6:50 AM against a 7:50 AM, −2.52 ft low.
- Read the park page, then the sky. Rules and closures from the land manager; a weather check the night before, because storms can push real water levels well above the prediction.
- Walk out with the ebb, back with the flood. The low is the midpoint of your visit, not the start.
That's the whole method. The moon publishes its schedule years in advance; NOAA turns it into numbers; we turn the numbers into hours. If you'd rather have the hours come to you, the Minus Tide Alert sends one email a week with your coast's next windows — computed, never padded.